[Personal_archives] Rounding out the week

[Cathy Marshall]

Hi Everyone,

I want to thank you for allowing me to listen in (and to participate far less than I'd intended).

I've come to appreciate more fully an archivist's perspective on personal materials and am beginning to realize what a tall order it is to bring archival skills to the digital realm. If I was already nervous about personal digital belongings from the consumer perspective, now I'm even more so.

During this week, I've talked at some length to a hobbyist photographer (by day he's a computer scientist) who was anxious to show me the extent of his personal collection. Staggering. 10,000 photos on Flickr alone. Very few have more than cursory metadata; a few have geotags (he wanted to show me the geotags--we clicked on a dozen photos before we found one with geotags). He told me he kept all his photos in RAW format, which I understand varies according to camera manufacturer. 

I said, "Don't you ever worry about format obsolescence?"

He said, "Are you kidding? Minolta will never go out of business!"

And I've always thought format is the least of our worries.

This business of an explicit strategy of benign neglect is something I'll be investigating further. Lately it's seemed to me that it's the stuff in the middle--the email, the tweets, the facebook profiles and walls, the legions of cameraphone photos (and regular digital snapshots), the ordinary stuff of our digital lives--that's so problematic and so vulnerable. It's the stuff in the middle that's awaiting digital disaster, just to keep proliferation in check. I was listening to some podcasters wax enthusiastic about an application that would return to them their very first tweet (which of course puzzled me, since that's readily available by simply expanding one's own tweet stream) and realized that so much of this stuff really is ephemeral, in spite of the fact that it's where people are spending so much of their attention. I'm sure they'd be appalled with the idea of keeping it--it would be overwhelming--yet losing it all seems wrong too. The last time I made an effort to survey the policies and EULAs of Web 2.0 providers, I noticed a uniform attitude of "we're not responsible! Let the user beware!" Yet it's very difficult to scrape some of these sites, and certainly an awful lot of people have lost original material through a combination of benign neglect and explicit policy decisions.

Do I take good care of my own digital belongings? I have to admit, I don't. I care about my blog, but the only way I preserve it is by printing it out when I post; I care about my email, but there too, I rely on servers out of my control; I care about my photos, and all I do there is adopt the typical consumer strategy of "throw them on an external hard drive, make multiple copies, and hope for the best." My tweets, my skype transcripts, my social networking protocols: those are good as gone. I do just as little and I'm just as flaky as everyone I interview and observe. I've re-encountered finished short stories on my hard drive that I've forgotten (I mean, short stories I've written myself), photos that now look only vaguely familiar (of unknown provenance), and half-written articles.

Whenever I press others on these questions, I find that we're all in the same boat, modulo a shelf of backups that in no way substitutes for an archive. (That is, there are people who are much better about immediate data safety than I am, but a RAID array is no surrogate for a long term preservation strategy.)

As usual, I've learned more than I've contributed, and I want to thank you all again.

best,
Cathy

-----Original Message-----
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hobbs, Catherine
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 1:21 PM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Personal_archives] Rounding out the week

Hi Everyone,
Well, it has been a stimulating week of discussion with our usual
fractal pattern of converging and diverging ideas and comments!  

Thank you so much Cathy for sitting in, listening to our thoughts,
adding your commentary and elucidating your ideas and methods.  It has
been very insightful for us.  I'd like to underline again how refreshing
it is to see you taking this innovative approach to personal digital
archiving from the standpoint of how people are actually functioning in
the digital realm now and anticipating how systems might facilitate
better methods of archiving based on human behaviour.  

As is often my experience after a week's discussion, I am at a loss as
to how to effectively wrap up the session since it appears that we have
more threads to be continued than issues we have in any way resolved.
However, I do take this to be a strength of this type of discussion:
that we end up with a random pattern of ideas which any one of us can
choose among and either bring back to the list for further discussion or
turn into an article or practical application.  And, yes, perhaps that
would be for me, as moderator, my version of "benign neglect". 

In hopes that we hear more on the list in the coming weeks,
Catherine




Catherine Hobbs
(SISPA Chair)
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